There's a lot of advice floating around about the idea of validating demand for products before spending the time creating them. It's been made clear that it's an important step to take, especially as an indie developer. But while the philosophy is talked about quite a bit I feel like there's been very little actionable advice about the steps to take. I've decided this morning to take a shot at making it approachable, by employing and idea from Eric Reis' "The Lean Startup" and develop a Build, Measure, Learn plan.
For those unfamiliar:
Build, measure, learn is typically used in relation to release cycles.
Learn: You define a hypothesis you would like to test in this release
Measure: You define the metrics that refute or confirm you theory
Build: You define the test(s) you need to run to collect the appropriate measurements
I'm not releasing anything, but I've felt like I'm floating without a direction. I feel passionately about improving the way food information and stories are shared. Hopefully this will point me in a direction where I can really start to get stuff done.
You can see my plan here:
https://www.notion.so/Helping-the-foodie-community-7798005ba11841c08ab4459711be173f
Hi Dakota,
Are you looking to start a blog or podcast about local food in your area?
Can you please explain what you mean by "improving the way food information and stories are shared"?
Up until I started getting into cooking (thanks quarantine) I was unaware of how under-served the "foodie" communities on the internet really are. I'm a software dev by trade, and I've observed that most of the tech that revolves around food hasn't changed much in the last ~15-20 years. Monetization is mostly done through gross sidebar ads, sites are typically built with drupal/wordpress or some other old CMS. The content featured is typically an ingredient list with a wall of plain-text instructions. Not to mention with the advent of social media, centralization has been a core principle in the products that have been made. I have a hypothesis that their could be space in the market for a democratized recipe sharing experience.
Okay, you mention problems with monetization and plain text instructions.
Are you saying you want to create a site where people can earn money by posting nicely formatted recipes?
Maybe a Squidoo for recipes?
Just from reading the Squidoo wikipedia page, I probably wouldn't want to go that route in terms of monetization. In terms of deliverables, it sounds like it was of a similar concept, but unfocused. My understanding of Squidoo is it was essentially a predecessor to products like SquareSpace. What I'm currently pondering over is similar, but with a more narrow focus on the type of content that is being produced. I also envision a GitHub like process for collaborating on the recipes as well. But both of those things are just my assumptions as of now. Hopefully these goals will help me get a better understanding of what people actually want help with vs what I think might help them